Adam Gnade
"Shiv Shiv Shake" CD (Impacto)
Six spoken-word tracks - and by spoken word, I really mean poetry slam entries in the making - backed with guitar textures much like those sonic backdrops that you can find on old Bill Hicks records. These stream-of-consciousness pieces ramble on about landlords and bakeries, death and Sam Cooke records; Gnade checks Jawbreaker's "The Boat Dreams From The Hill," Golden Hill punks and a laundry list of band houses heading into downtown San Diego. Unless you've lived where he's talking about (and I lived at 26th and A when it was a ghetto with SDPD helicopters flying over all night, every night, not a gentrifying yuppie enclave with skyrocketing property values and constantly increasing rents), these pieces probably won't speak to you much. The most impressive aspect of this release is that Gnade apparently constructed it himself. The liner notes, such as they are, were pretty obviously assembled and cut by hand. While this doesn't much move me to listen to it more than a couple of times, I can at least tip my hat to how it was made.